If you would like a television show to die after a season or less, I’m your girl. If I like it enough from the very first episode, it’s dead. I had a string of these in the 1990s, with notable inclusions that you probably won’t remember, such as VR.5 and the revival of Dark Shadows. Both of these ended on a cliffhanger, of course, creating black holes of non-closure for my life that will never be resolved. I fear the same thing is about to happen to Caprica, but I’m trying to be positive.
Probably the most notable instance of this in my life was the brilliant 1995-1996 show American Gothic. I probably throw the word “brilliant” around too much, but I really do believe this was a brilliant show, especially in the writing.
Created by Shaun Cassidy (yes, that Shaun Cassidy) and produced by Sam Raimi, American Gothic was, I think, ahead of its time. I loved it when it was first run when I was a teenager—it was the most intriguing thing I’d probably ever seen on television at that point.
Southern ghosts are an irresistible subject for me. When I was little, one of my favorite things was the ghost stories my dad would tell me about his hometown in Alabama. I’m also inexplicably, unadulteratedly drawn to the macabre, the sinister, and the mysterious. American Gothic had all of the above in spades.
It also had Gary Cole as the diabolical Sheriff Lucas Buck. One of my favorite tweeters said on Twitter not too long ago that Gary Cole makes everything he’s in cooler (or better, or something—I’m paraphrasing). So true. In this role, he’s smarmy, sardonic, ironically sexy, even witty, and that’s all in one twitch of the eyebrow. His tongue-in-cheek one-liners are perfect and require no sunglasses removal.
When I found American Gothic on Hulu a few weeks ago, I’m pretty sure my heart literally skipped a beat or two. I was thrilled, but I actually had some slight reservations—the show had a lot to live up to in my memory. I mean, to this day, members of my family will still quote the tagline “someone’s at the do-wah” at opportune moments. I’ve bemoaned its cancellation for a decade and a half. How could it possibly be as good as I remembered?
It was. It is. I watched the first half of the episodes one by one, sometimes going days in between. By the second half or so, it was just like when I watched it the first time around, only this time I had the luxury of playing them all back-to-back in the Hulu pop-out player on the corner of my screen at work. I lapped them up.
Yeah, you can tell it was made a while back. I don’t watch a whole lot of current TV (at least not actually on TV, or on a regular basis), but even I know just how dramatically it has changed, even just in the past few years. The thing is, though, American Gothic still holds up. Strangely, though I stand by my earlier statement that it was ahead of its time, I’m not sure exactly what time it would fit in. I think if it ran today, it would still be something singular, something fascinating. Something I would watch, hungrily.
The closest thing to an heir of American Gothic, of the few contemporary shows I’ve seen over the past several months, I think, would be True Blood. Granted, I only saw a couple of episodes, so I don’t know if it’s an accurate appraisal. Still, while I thought True Blood was well done, it didn’t hook me. And, it was a little too graphic for me in a few ways. 
American Gothic got a little edgy now and then—even, at some points, making me raise my eyebrows when I considered the original time during which it aired—but it was often surprisingly subtle and nuanced, at least for television, in handling such. It’s gritty and compelling, yes; it’s also pretty to look at. I guess I just like my evil stylized.
The question of evil in the series is one I could write several posts about. I love the whole Mephistopheles-meets-Andy-Griffith character of Sheriff Buck, and how he never/rarely destroys anyone himself; instead, he dispassionately rolls the shiny poison apple into their paths and lets them take their own destruction from there.
I’ve also always been impressed with Lucas Black as Caleb Temple. He brought a serious complexity to his role as Sheriff Buck’s illegitimate son whom he was trying to bring over to the “dark side.” That kid was deep.
All that to say, it wasn’t a perfect show. But…I really do believe it was the perfect show for me, that it was appallingly overlooked, and that it certainly deserved more than it got from the network. It was, unfortunately, aired with episodes out of order and would go on hiatus at random. That’s why, if you want to take my advice and watch it, and you should, go here to get the correct episode order and watch accordingly.
So…go do that now.
As you also probably already know, this is an apples-and-oranges question for me. Not that Ryan wasn’t possibly influenced a little, at least indirectly, by the Beatles (I maintain that he channels John Lennon in “
